Waiting for Manny

Boston’s mystery man.

“That guy, he’s in his own world, on his own planet,” a teammate says of Ramirez.

PHILIP BURKE

Manny Ramirez is a deeply frustrating employee, the kind whose talents are so prodigious that he gets away with skipping meetings, falling asleep on the job, and fraternizing with the competition. He makes more money than everyone else at the company yet somehow escapes the usual class resentment, and even commands more respect from the wage slaves, who suspect he is secretly one of them, than from his colleagues in business class. It’s not that he is anti-establishment, exactly, but in his carefree way he’s just subversive enough—“affably apathetic” is how one of his bosses put it recently—to create headaches for any manager who worries about precedent. Despite his generous compensation, he is sufficiently ungrateful to let it be known that he would be happier working elsewhere. He is also, for a man of stature, strangely sensitive, and although his brilliance is accompanied by sloppiness, one criticizes him, as with a wayward teen-ager, at the risk of losing him to bouts of brooding and inaccessibility.

Ramirez, now entering his seventh season with the Boston Red Sox, is the best baseball player to come out of the New York City public-school system since Sandy Koufax, and by many accounts the greatest right-handed hitter of his generation, though attempts to locate him in time and space, as we shall see, inevitably miss the mark. He is perhaps the closest thing in contemporary professional sports to a folk hero, an unpredictable public figure about whom relatively little is actually known but whose exploits, on and off the field, are recounted endlessly, with each addition punctuated by a shrug and the observation that it’s just “Manny being Manny.” When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, “As a crazy motherfucker.” Then he pointed at my notebook and said, “You can write it down just like that: ‘David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.’ That guy, he’s in his own world, on his own planet. Totally different human being than everyone else.” Ortiz is not alone in emphasizing that Ramirez’s originality resonates at the level of species. Another teammate, Julian Tavarez, recently told a reporter from the Boston Herald, “There’s a bunch of humans out here, but to Manny, he’s the only human.”

Ramirez, who was born in Santo Domingo in 1972 and moved to the heavily Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, in northern Manhattan, when he was thirteen, still spoke little English by the time he was drafted, and he remains a man of few words. Those words, however, have a way of sounding aphoristic: “All I need to see is the ball,” or “Do what makes you happy.” In 1999, after he’d established himself as a superstar with the Cleveland Indians, written messages began appearing on the backs of his cleats, like admonitions from a prophet: “There will be hell to pay”; “Justice will be served”; “Can’t we all get along?”; “Live and let die.” Greg Brown, a journeyman minor-league catcher who worked out with Ramirez last winter, said, “Sometimes I think it’s Manny’s world, and we all just exist in it.”

According to lore, Ramirez has, or had, two Social Security numbers and five active driver’s licenses—none of which he managed to present to the officer who pulled him over in 1997 for driving with illegally tinted windows and the stereo blasting at earsplitting volume. “The cop knew who he was,” as Sheldon Ocker, the Indians beat reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal, tells it. “He said, ‘Manny, I’m going to give you a ticket.’ Manny says, ‘I don’t need any tickets, I can give you tickets,’ and reaches for the glove compartment. Then he leaves the scene by making an illegal U-turn and he gets another ticket.”

Ramirez’s appearance—he styles his hair in dreadlocks, wears a uniform cut for a sumo wrestler, and smiles broadly and indiscriminately—hints at this extracurricular flakiness, and even gives off a whiff of pothead. (In 2002, he requested that the song “Good Times,” by Styles P, be played over the Fenway Park P.A. system before one of his at-bats, and unsuspecting fans were treated to lyrics such as “Every day I need a ounce and a half . . . take a blunt, just to ease the pain . . . I get high, high, high.”) During pitching changes at Fenway, he has been known to disappear behind a door in the left-field wall, and on one occasion he nearly missed the resumption of play—an averted transgression that he at one point blamed on his bladder.

In the outfield and on the base paths, Ramirez can seem oafish and clumsy, and many of the baseball-related incidents for which he is best known reflect a chronic absent-mindedness, but I prefer the most Roy Hobbsian anecdote, in which he hits a home run with a broken bat—it was broken before he swung, that is, and he used it anyway because he was fond of it—since it illustrates both his enthusiasm and his preternatural gift for hitting. He is an intensely serious batter who practices with greater determination than almost any other, but the magic in his swing—minimal stride, maximal weight shift—comes from somewhere within. He is thick but not big by today’s standards, about six feet and two hundred pounds, and without the sculpted Hulk Hogan physique that has become the norm, yet only Mark McGwire, Harmon Killebrew, and Babe Ruth hit four hundred and fifty home runs more quickly than Ramirez, and only Lou Gehrig, who, like Ramirez, spent his formative years practicing in Manhattan’s Highbridge Park, hit more grand slams.

In Boston, where the “knights of the keyboard,” in Ted Williams’s famous formulation, cover baseball the way affairs of state are covered in Washington, Ramirez remains a phenomenon more discussed than understood. They share sightings, transcribe every utterance, and speculate about the induction speech he’ll give in Cooperstown circa 2015. But for some reason I have not seen it remarked upon that Ramirez chose to name both of his first two sons Manny, Jr.

A running joke in Boston has it that none of Ramirez’s coaches know when he gets to the ballpark in the morning, because he’s always there (if sometimes napping) when they arrive. His punctuality does not extend into the off-season, however, the length of which varies depending on whether you ask the team or Ramirez. Few people affiliated with the Red Sox have a good idea about where he might be or what he’s up to in the winter months, other than that he tends to visit the Dominican Republic for about a week and always stays in shape. This year, it turned out, he had a 1967 Lincoln Continental convertible he wanted to sell.

“Manny Ramirez, you know, good guy,” Jay Silberman, one of the promoters of the Atlantic City Classic Cars Auction, said on the last weekend in February, while sitting in a makeshift office in the convention center on Miss America Way. “But Manny is a space ranger—flies by the seat of his own pants. When he called, I said, ‘Manny, is it my imagination or isn’t it spring-training time?’ ” The Red Sox had asked pitchers and catchers to report to the team training facility, in Fort Myers, on February 16th, with infielders and outfielders to follow on the 20th, but Ramirez, who had attended the car show once before, merely to browse, evidently thought it might be nice to be there on the auction stand in person. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah,’ ” Silberman went on. “He said, ‘No, I’ll just fly in, go back. I’ll get a private jet, come in, and leave.’ But, apparently, what I didn’t know was that he told the Red Sox that someone was ill.”

That someone was Ramirez’s mother, Onelcida, who is sixty, and with whom Ramirez remains extremely close. (He attributed a rare batting slump in 2005 to her health, saying, “My mom’s been real sick. I’ve been thinking a lot about that.”) Ramirez told this not to the Red Sox front office—which spent the winter trying, at his request, to trade him—but to the pitcher Julian Tavarez, about a week before the car show, in the course of explaining, by the bye, that he wouldn’t be joining the squad until March 1st. Tavarez, who was already in Fort Myers, mentioned it to a newscaster, and thus in a roundabout way the team’s manager, Terry Francona, came to understand that he’d be starting the Grapefruit League season without his cleanup batter. (Francona is not without a sense of humor—he said on ESPN, “If Manny has to urinate in the scoreboard every once in a while, we can live with that”—and he now refers to Tavarez as Ramirez’s publicist.) Then came word of radio commercials up north that were promising Ramirez’s personal appearance at a classic-cars event in Atlantic City (“TAKING SOX FOR A RIDE?” asked the Herald), and the Red Sox were put in the position of needing to confirm that their enigmatic star would be staying home with Mom.

Ramirez has bailed on commitments before. Near the end of his stint with the Cleveland Indians, in 2000, team officials stopped asking him to make public appearances altogether, since he predictably failed to turn up. (“I would have to stand around the clubhouse and wait, to make sure he didn’t duck out on me,” Abraham Allende, the team’s former director of community relations, says.) He was the M.V.P. of the 2004 World Series, which Boston won for the first time in eighty-six years, yet he neglected to accompany the team to Washington for the customary Presidential handshake.

I went to Atlantic City, just in case. The auction, billed as “America’s largest indoor collectible car event,” occupied twenty acres of floor space, or a little more than twice the area of Fenway Park, with a grandstand at one end and beer and popcorn venders lining the perimeter. In addition to the usual ’Cudas and Studebakers and DeVilles, the offerings included a limousine belonging to Donald Trump and the Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson’s 1987 Buick Grand National, with “Reggie 44” plates. (Reggie himself was on the premises, meeting and greeting.) A small crowd had gathered around a pin-striped Rolls-Royce signed by a hundred and fifty current and former New York Yankees. Vinny Caraccio, the Rolls owner, had brought “Red Sox Suck” and “Yankees Suck” T-shirts with him, in anticipation of Ramirez’s appearance. “I was dying for him to come here,” he said. “I wanted to take pictures with Manny—drape the shirts in front of us. I was going to ask him to drive it up. I hear he’s a character.”

Ramirez’s Lincoln—enormous, flat like a boat, painted Neptune blue and upholstered in ostrich—was parked directly across from the Rolls, unattended. “It’s received so many compliments,” Silberman, the promoter, said. “You might not even like that kind of car, but you can still admire what he did to it. He totally customized it. He’s got TVs in it. He’s got a computer in it. It’s just a tricked-out car.”

Ramirez paid ten thousand dollars for the Lincoln and, in 2004, took it to the shop of a hot-rod specialist whom he’d seen on the Discovery Channel. “This is a car you’re going to keep for the rest of your life—you’re not going to sell it,” he said at the time, adding that he intended to give the car to his father, Aristides, who is now sixty-nine, as a birthday gift. Now Ramirez was hoping to get two hundred thousand for it, and selling duty, in his absence, fell to a New Jersey-based Cadillac dealer named Tony Averso, who wore a Red Sox cap, a yellow oxford shirt, and jeans, and sucked on an unlit cigar.

Bidding on the car began—fierce at first, and then tapering off to a final offer of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, considerably short of Ramirez’s goal. No sale. Averso took a seat at his dealership’s booth, in the corner, and, despite the no-show, in effect wondered why the Red Sox and their fans find Ramirez so elusive. “This guy calls me up at least five times a week just to say hello,” he said. “He calls me up for Thanksgiving. Knows my wife’s Jewish—he called her up for Hanukkah. Around Christmas, I said, ‘You gain any weight?’ He says, ‘Yeah, a few pounds. Why don’t you come and run with me?’ He wants me to go down to his mother’s house and eat dinner when I go down to Florida. I mean, that’s the kind of guy he is. Manny would love just to come here and sit. He’d hang out with my group.”

“They say, ‘Manny being Manny,’ but we used to say, ‘That’s Manny,’ ” Steve Mandl, the baseball coach at George Washington High School, on Audubon Avenue at 193rd Street, said recently, as he stood sentry by the locker-room door before a midmorning gym class. “It wasn’t crazy stuff—it’s just that he didn’t really care about anything other than playing. Even team pictures—it wasn’t important to him. You had to drag him by the hair. But if you said we had a game at three o’clock he’d, like, want to sit out there at seven o’clock in the morning, waiting.” Mandl has been coaching at George Washington for twenty-four years, and his team has won its division title in each of the past twenty-three. While he talked, a properly officious-looking school administrator with a mustache accosted one of the current George Washington players in the hall and shouted threats about the consequences of cutting class. Mandl rolled his eyes; he was familiar with such displays. Ramirez was suspended periodically as a freshman for truancy, and did not graduate, although he attended enough classes to get through three seasons of varsity baseball as a center fielder and third baseman. (He later got his G.E.D.) His picture hangs only in Coach Mandl’s office, but he is at least as good a model of success as the alumni—Harry Belafonte, Alan Green-span, Henry Kissinger—whose framed portraits grace the entrance hall.

Onelcida Ramirez worked as a seamstress in a dress factory; Aristides drove a livery cab and fixed electronics. Manny and his three older sisters, Rosa, Evelyn, and Clara, lived in a sixth-floor walkup on 168th Street. They had no telephone. The neighborhood at the time was one of the city’s worst—only East New York, in Brooklyn, had more homicides in 1990. Every morning at five-thirty, Manny left the apartment to run up Snake Hill, behind the high school, with a rope tied around his waist attached to a spare tire that dragged on the pavement behind him. “He was the hardest worker I ever had,” Mandl said.

The baseball field at George Washington is oddly shaped, long in left and center fields, and short—about two hundred and eighty feet—in right, which is constrained by the downward slope of the Harlem River Valley. For Ramirez, who already displayed instinctive patience at the plate, this provided an added incentive to wait on pitches, see them longer, and drive them the opposite way, a rare habit among pros, let alone teen-agers. In his final year, the Hitman, as he came to be called, batted .643.

Ramirez was extremely shy, and never asked his family to come watch him play. His first year away from home, in the minors, he borrowed a phone card belonging to Mel Zitter, who had coached him in the summer and on weekends in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and ran up an eight-hundred-dollar tab in a month. (Now, as a millionaire, he worries about the cost of talking on the phone for longer than a minute at a time.) He didn’t fully grasp that he had a future as a professional baseball player until 1993, when he reached class AA, in Canton, Ohio. That year, he also met his future publicist Tavarez, a fellow-Dominican who, as it happened, shared his love for the internal-combustion engine. As big-league rookies, they asked the newspaper reporter Sheldon Ocker if they could borrow sixty thousand dollars. “We were in Kansas City,” Ocker recalls. “I reached into my pocket, and I’m, like, ‘I don’t have that much.’ Manny says, ‘How about thirty thousand?’ Each of them wanted to buy a Harley.” Abraham Allende, who at the time went by the Anglicized name Allen Davis, was put in charge of tutoring the two pals in English. Tavarez became a dedicated student; Ramirez played hooky. Allende referred to them as his good son and his bad son. They referred to each other as Rambo. For years afterward, Ramirez raided his teammates’ lockers, borrowing their bats and clothes—even their underwear—for luck. The baggy-uniform look, now popular across the league, can be traced to his swiping the pants of Dan Williams, a bullpen catcher in Cleveland, who outweighed him by at least fifty pounds.

Once it was clear that he’d finally made it, the entire Ramirez family moved with Manny to a suburb of Cleveland, and eventually to Florida, and stopped returning to Washington Heights. “We’d like him to help the program out, which he doesn’t, unfortunately,” Mandl said. “The kids, every day, it’s ‘Why doesn’t Manny do this? Why doesn’t Manny do that?’ We’d like to put lights on the field.”

In the winter of 2000, Ramirez became eligible to file for free agency, and his agent at the time, Jeff Moorad, allowed cameras to film the negotiation process. The video, which aired on ESPN that December, shows Moorad fielding inquiries from the Indians, the Yankees, and the Mariners, before the Red Sox enter the picture. “I’m one of those guys that don’t talk a lot,” Ramirez warns Boston’s general manager, Dan Duquette. “I just go and try to play the game.” Toward the end, with Boston emerging as the front-runner, Moorad adds an unusual request. “I want you to think on the way up about how you would add to your clubhouse payroll a new clubby, who would be coming over from Cleveland,” he tells Duquette.

The clubby’s name was Frank Mancini. He mixed Ramirez’s protein shakes, advised him to eat sushi, and, most important, set the pitching machine so that it would issue sliders, low and away—a routine he picked up from the Indians’ slugger Albert Belle, who believed that these were the toughest of all pitches to hit. Ramirez spent as much as a half hour every day hitting nothing but hard sliders on the rail, attempting to drive them to the opposite field, and came to see Mancini as yet another kind of lucky charm. The Red Sox, in the end, were willing to oblige his unusual request, but Lucky Charm declined the offer (“Manny, I love you like a brother, but I can’t do that”), preferring to stay at home with his family. Mancini cautioned Ramirez, “Boston is a lot harder place to play than Cleveland,” but Ramirez signed with the Sox: eight years for a hundred and sixty million dollars, the second-largest contract, after Alex Rodriguez’s, in baseball history. During his inaugural appearance in Boston, Ramirez draped his arm around a Red Sox clubhouse attendant. “You and me are going to be friends,” he said.

Duquette had been following Ramirez’s career since high school, but he now concedes that he had no idea “exactly how unique” his new left fielder was. “When Manny first came to the Red Sox, he would stand in the batter’s box, and the umpire would call ball four, and he would get back in the batter’s box,” Duquette, who is now the president of the fledgling Israel Baseball League, told me. “He did this in his first series at Fenway Park and again on his first road trip.” After the third such incident, Duquette ventured down into the locker room. “I said, ‘Manny, let me ask you something. I was just wondering why you get back in the batter’s box after ball four.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the balls.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the strikes, either, until I got two.’ Then he said, ‘Duke, I’m up there looking for a pitch I can hit. If I don’t get it, I wait for the umpire to tell me to go to first. Isn’t that what you’re paying me to do?’ ”

Duquette was fired after Ramirez’s first season in Boston, when a new ownership group took over the club. Bill James, a senior adviser who was brought in by the new regime, conducted a couple of studies to try to measure, among other things, the effect of Ramirez’s quirks—his tendency to glare at badly hit balls without running to first, his sporadic inability in the field to follow the arc of a fly ball. In 2003, James identified fifty-three instances in which Red Sox players had demonstrated a game-altering failure to hustle; twenty-nine of them involved Ramirez. He also concluded that Ramirez was the team’s second-sloppiest fielder. (A Times column last month underscored this point, quoting an analyst who said, “Manny is at the far end of the as-bad-as-you-can-get-in-the-field spectrum.”) In theory, playing defense and hustling are also things that he is paid to do, and in the fall of 2003 the new management, convinced that Ramirez’s twenty-million-dollar salary was an albatross, placed their best hitter on irrevocable waivers, asking nothing in return for any team’s willingness simply to take him (and his contract) off their hands.

There were no takers, and the next spring, according to the writer Seth Mnookin, Ramirez let the Sox ownership know that he felt angry and insulted. Thus began the semiannual “rite of passage,” as the Sox C.E.O., Larry Lucchino, calls it, in which Ramirez pleads to be shipped out of Boston—a city where, as his former teammate Johnny Damon once said, “Manny could be Mayor.”

The local obsession with the Red Sox is such that David Wells, the former Yankee and Red Sox pitcher, and a night owl, likes to call Boston Picturetown, rather than Beantown, because of all the fans with cell-phone cameras in restaurants and bars, ready for deployment like civilian paparazzi. (One well-travelled series of candid shots, posted on the Web, shows a smiling Ramirez wearing a boater and a football jersey, first at a bar and then, evidently having been talked into visiting a collegiate apartment, dancing with young women, one in her pajamas.) In a famous incident in August of 2003, Ramirez called in sick during a big series against the Yankees, only to be accused by someone at the Ritz-Carlton of having a post-game cocktail with the Yankees’ Enrique Wilson, another Santo Domingo native. Ramirez, who was publicly excoriated and even benched for this affront, lives in the Ritz, with his wife, Juliana, a Brazilian whom he met at a gym in 2001, and their two sons, Manny, Jr., who is four, and Lucas, who is one. (The other Manny, Jr., who is eleven, lives in Florida with his mother.) His defenders maintain that the Wilson visit was social but not libational.

The Red Sox management believe that Ramirez does not dislike Boston per se. “If he was really upset about it, he wouldn’t live in the Ritz-Carlton, in the middle of the city,” one executive told me. Since his arrival in town, Ramirez has expressed interest, at one time or another, in playing for more than a dozen different teams, including the Yankees and the Mets. According to a Sox official, he even once requested a trade to Pawtucket, the team’s AAA affiliate in Rhode Island—a transaction that the chamber of commerce in that city of seventy-three thousand would no doubt welcome. Lately, he has favored Anaheim and Seattle as alternatives, though for several years he told friends that he regretted leaving the relatively anonymous comfort of Cleveland and wished he could return.

Ray Negron, a special adviser to George Steinbrenner who previously worked in Cleveland as a mentor to the team’s Hispanic players, is familiar with Ramirez’s moods and vulnerability. “I remember one time he was hurt and feeling sorry for himself,” Negron said. “And I knew I was going to be in the car with him for half an hour, so I made him listen to Frank Sinatra’s rendition of ‘That’s Life’—did you ever hear the words?—and he caught it. He understood what I was trying to say to him.” Ramirez, ordinarily a hip-hop man, walked around humming Sinatra for days.

Clinical explanations for Ramirez’s unpredictable behavior vary. Steve Mandl once suggested that Ramirez suffers from attention-deficit disorder—a diagnosis that Dan Duquette disputes, arguing that he “did a lot of due diligence” before signing Ramirez, and that, if anything, Ramirez’s approach to batting suggested an essential undistractibility. Popular diagnoses abound—“If we didn’t have Manny to talk about, who would we talk about?” Duquette says—and tend toward the faintly condescending, clichés about Ramirez as man-child (“He’s great with kids”) or idiot savant or holy fool.

Negron, for one, thinks Ramirez is misunderstood in Boston. He compared him with Joe DiMaggio. “Manny’s more emotionally reachable than Joe was, O.K.?” he said. “They should be fair about this. I got to know Joe DiMaggio, and I was very close to Billy Martin, who knew everything about Joe DiMaggio. You know the difference? Manny’s probably a better hitter.” He went on, “I came up with the craziness of the Yankees in the seventies—the ‘Bronx Zoo,’ and Sparky Lyle and all of them sitting on cakes without clothes on. Manny was mild compared to what I had been used to.” In Cleveland, I pointed out, Ramirez used to walk into the video room naked to study tapes of pitchers. “Do you understand why I would see that as normal?” Negron said. “He wasn’t sitting on a birthday cake.”

I got a tip from an informant that Ramirez was going to be in Fort Myers earlier—or, rather, less late—than planned, on Monday, February 26th, so I wrote the Red Sox to request a press credential. When John Blake, the director of media relations, informed me that I’d be wasting my time—that Ramirez wasn’t expected until Thursday, March 1st—I made the mistake of mentioning that I’d been led to believe otherwise. Fifteen minutes later, I got an angry call from the informant, who said I’d blown my shot at an interview by leaking the news of Ramirez’s surprise appearance.

Ramirez, unlike many superstars, has traditionally been affectionate, even playful, with reporters—hugging, tickling, piggybacking. “I remember one time, in the clubhouse in Cleveland, somebody jumped on my back like I’m supposed to carry him,” the Beacon Journal’s Sheldon Ocker said. “And it was Manny. I have no idea why he did that. When he got off, he just smiled.” In his early years in Boston, when he’d gone a while without hitting a home run, Ramirez would sometimes squeeze the biceps of passing beat writers and say, “Got no pop!” But he has never expressed much interest in actually conversing with the press, and in recent years, as relations between Ramirez and his employers cooled to their current state of détente, he has taken to ignoring the media outright, giving them what the Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy calls the “Patrick Swayze-in-‘Ghost’ treatment, like you’re not there.” Last year, Ramirez answered questions for only seven minutes on the morning of his arrival in Fort Myers, and then called it a season. (“I’m here,” he said. “I get paid to play baseball. That’s why I’m here. That’s it. What else can I say?”) In August, during what many who follow the team now refer to as “the shutdown,” when Ramirez pulled himself from the lineup for twenty-eight of the final thirty-six games with a knee injury that teammates and front-office executives alike have privately questioned, Shaughnessy approached him for comment, and asked him questions for fifteen or twenty seconds, with no response. “He was in the bat rack going through some lumber, and he turned on his heels—he sort of wheeled around—and he kind of patted me on the back and took off smiling.”

My tipster, in any event, was right. On the Monday following the car show, Ramirez showed up in camp, sporting red streaks in his dreads (last spring, they were orange) and a beard on his chin, and he proceeded directly to work—to the batting cage—letting his agents handle the questions.

Q: Why is Manny here today?

A: He was ready to report, and he’s excited to be here. . . .

Q: Manny is thirty-four now. Do you think it’s time for him to be more accountable, instead of being babied like a twelve-year-old?

A: Well, I wouldn’t accept your characterization of his behavior. . . . He’s happy to be here. He’s here before he’s required to be here.

Q: Do you think, since he’s your meal ticket, you should try to help him grow up?

A: Again, I wouldn’t agree with your characterization. . . .

Q: What has changed since he asked to be traded last fall?

A: He’s here right now, and he’s excited to be here.

Inside the cage, hitting soft tosses from his new clubhouse sidekick, Ino Guerrero, Ramirez betrayed no awareness of the surrounding frenzy. He began each swing almost daintily, laying his bat down against the outside edge of the plate, using his left, or bottom, hand, to mark his territory before assuming the ready stance—wide, upright, half cocked—that instills fear in so many pitchers.

Later, Terry Francona sat by a fence in front of the clubhouse, chatting with the press. He’d recently returned from a meeting with league officials, where a new set of rules had been introduced, intended to speed up the game—for instance, forbidding managers from leaving the dugout to protest umpires’ warnings. “I don’t particularly agree with these rules,” Francona said, jabbing a fungo bat into the ground. “I’ll follow ’em, because we have bosses, but . . .” His voice was drowned out by the adoring shouts of fans (“Manny! Manny!”) as the team’s most notorious rule breaker jogged back toward the clubhouse to shower.

“It’s just impossible to insult the fans if you’re that good,” Shaughnessy, a frequent Ramirez critic, said later. “It’s the equivalent of the beautiful woman who’s loved by all the guys regardless of anything else she may contribute.” (Shaughnessy’s son, a freshman on the Boston College baseball team, wore Ramirez’s No. 24 throughout high school, in homage.)

After a few days in Fort Myers, I began to sympathize with Ramirez’s sense of baseball as a game to be played rather than analyzed, and also to suspect that it was not so much quaintness as shrewdness that explained his tunnel vision. During the off-season, the Sox had paid fifty-one million dollars merely to win the right to negotiate a contract with the Japanese pitching star Daisuke Matsuzaka, or Dice-K, as he is commonly known. (The contract itself ended up costing fifty-two million more, for six years’ service.) Matsuzaka’s arrival brought more than a hundred members of the Japanese press corps to Florida, and his every move—what he ate for lunch, whether or not he put ice on his arm—was scrutinized for daily news reports and video segments back home. Local real-estate agents canvassed the press box, dispensing condominium brochures stapled to free bags of snow-pea crisps.

In Japanese baseball, the most highly prized virtue is doryoku, or unflagging effort, and Ramirez’s stubborn stand-offishness, at least in the early days, seemed a direct clash with the polite forbearance of Matsuzaka. Without much chance to see Ramirez’s prowess at the plate in live action, and in the absence of any of his signature comic moments (give him time), the foreigners were left with a primarily negative impression. “I just know he’s kind of selfish,” Naofumi Murakami, a writer for the Asahi Shimbun, said of Ramirez, on the afternoon of his first start, against Toronto. “He doesn’t speak a lot, and the people are afraid of him.” Then he added, “I just talked to Matsuzaka. He said Ramirez is very kind to Matsuzaka. They spoke Spanish, and he said hello.”

Buried but hardly forgotten in the Fort were stories involving Terry Francona’s decision to quit dipping (“Spit Tobacco Abstinence & Recovery War Begins Tonight,” said an official Red Sox press release) and the launch of Curt Schilling’s blog. Schilling, the team’s Opening Day starter, somehow managed to post more words in an evening, after practice, than many beat writers produce in a week, and he even scooped the scribes on the biggest recurring story of the spring—the question of who would fill the bullpen closer’s role (answer: Jonathan Papelbon). Although he never mentioned Ramirez by name, Schilling, one of the few players who has never seemed to find amusement in the Tao of Manny, did write, “I talk to the media because part of what I do, win or lose, is stand at my locker and answer questions about the game. I was taught that was part of the job when you are in the big leagues.”

Ramirez, for his part, distributed T-shirts with the words “Manny being Manny” on the back, along with his career statistics. During a game against the Mets in Port St. Lucie, he was heckled after trotting to first base prematurely, on what he thought was ball four; and in the third week of March, just as things were beginning to drag, he was responsible for the introduction of some welcome levity, when the clubhouse television, tuned to “Pardon the Interruption,” showed that an industrial-sized Jenn-Air barbecue, apparently belonging to Ramirez, had turned up on eBay. “Hi, I’m Manny Ramirez,” the product description said. “I bought this AMAZING grill for about $4000. . . . But I never have the time to use it because I am always on the road.” The Web posting was accompanied by pictures of a smiling Ramirez standing in a garage with the grill by his side, in a T-shirt and shorts and bare feet.

His teammates teased him about it. “I’m a businessman,” Ramirez replied. This wasn’t sufficient explanation for the journalists, and as the eBay mystery gained momentum—it elicited an editorial from the Globe—Ramirez even felt compelled to converse with the press, breaking his silence of three hundred and eighty-four days. He told the Globe’s Amalie Benjamin that it was his neighbor’s grill, and the Herald’s Karen Guregian that it was his own (“I need the money”), before gently deflecting most baseball-related questions. “Why do people want to know what I think?” he asked Guregian. “I like to play the game. I don’t like to give opinions.”

The grill auction lent a nice merchandising symmetry to the spring season, which had, of course, begun with the car auction. (Next month, courtesy of Longball Vineyards: Manny Being Merlot, available from your local New England vintner.) And it provided ample fodder for the chatterboxes on WEEI, Boston’s sports-talk radio, who tallied incoming bids like election returns deep into the night, from forty-eight hundred to seventy thousand to two hundred and ninety-five thousand to—this could no longer be serious—fifty million, or the amount of Matsuzaka’s contract.

EBay eventually cancelled the auction, which maxed out at $99,999,999, citing irregularities, but the next afternoon, during batting practice, Ramirez told Maureen Mullen, from MLB.com, that “the grill people” had been in touch with his agent about the possibility of doing a commercial. Television cameras later caught Ramirez goofing around in the dugout with teammates, practicing a new handshake that incorporated a burger-flipping gesture.

Ramirez, for all his antics, is feeling the effects of age, and this past winter, for the first time in his career, he swung a bat to get ready for the upcoming season. Beginning December 1st, he trained almost every day at a facility called Perfect Competition, outside Fort Lauderdale. For two months, he worked exclusively on hitting the ball to the right side, but he has decided to abandon his years-long attempt to master the outside rail—the old Frank Mancini special—and concede those rare pitchers’ pitches rather than try to drive them the other way. “Getting old,” he remarked in the final week of spring training. “I don’t mess around with it no more.” That’s an exclusive, because the scribe he said it to was me.

Karen Guregian, the Herald reporter who spoke with Ramirez about his grill, likened her experience to being granted a papal audience. On this day, when I managed to hold Ramirez’s ear for more than nine minutes in the clubhouse, the shortstop Julio Lugo consecrated the occasion by showering us both with talcum powder, before turning the bottle loose inside his pants.

Ramirez’s dreads were bundled up in a translucent red hairnet, like a Rastafarian kippah, through which I could see that he is starting to go gray. He has always said that he lives in the present, not the past, but he seemed nonetheless to be thinking more about history. “I like to travel, man,” he said. “I been to Europe—you know, Spain. Dominican, Aruba, Costa Rica. Just to learn about different cultures. You know where I want to go? I want to go to China. I want to go and see—it’s a city that I don’t know how to say the name. It’s the Prohibit City?” He meant the Forbidden City, in Beijing. “I saw it on the History Channel. They do a lot of tours over there.” He said he’d been reading books in Spanish about the Dominican Republic (“so I know more about my country”), where he thinks he’ll probably move when he retires. In the Dominican Republic, Julian Tavarez told me, Ramirez is “like a god,” and, unlike here, no one cares about “what’s going on with his life and all that.”

On that sore subject, he seemed at peace in Boston for the time being (“I don’t think it’s hard to play there, man. I think you make it harder”), but he also wasn’t sure where or when, exactly, he’d finish his career. “Hey, I don’t know,” he said. “Baseball, you know, one day you’re here, the next day you’re in another place. So you really cannot say, ‘Oh, I’m going to be here for a long time.’ ”

We talked a little about cars. “I’m looking for a ’62 or a ’63 Lincoln convertible, because the one that I have now is a ’67, and the ’67 is too long,” Ramirez said, adding that he was planning to try to sell it again in a month. “If I could find a ’63, it would be nice, because, you know, that’s the historical Kennedy car. I’ve been looking for one for seven months already. I can’t find nothing. Everybody seems to like, you know, classic cars. Sometimes you just want to go and have one.”

His mom had had a stroke, he said, but she was doing much better. “What happened to her was that they found, like, a lot of bad blood behind her stomach. So now they’re giving her some pills so they could thin the blood.” And he confirmed, with some regret, that he hadn’t been back to his old neighborhood in Manhattan in a long time, even though he travelled to New York three or four times a year to play the Yankees. “For me it’s hard, because I’m just focussed, you know, on having good years,” he said. “And after the game I like to go to my hotel. I’m not twenty-five years old anymore. I’m not a boy. I take my time and get to bed.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.